


heaven's off the table

by ODed_on_jingle_jangle



Series: snakes to a mongoose [7]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Arguing, Background Relationships, Dialogue Heavy, Gen, Hospitals, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, Past Alice Cooper/FP Jones II, Past Relationship(s), Protective Parents, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-02 11:06:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20274898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ODed_on_jingle_jangle/pseuds/ODed_on_jingle_jangle
Summary: The complimentary coffee in the waiting area of Riverdale General doesn’t taste quite right to Alice. Always tastes too dark for her liking, too bitter no matter how many spoonfuls of non-fat creamer or packets of sweetener she adds. She drinks some anyway, hot and soothing to a throat that’s gone sore after days of smothering her frustrated screams into her pillow. It would be an understatement to say Alice has many things to scream about these days. Murderers in her home, in her bed, her daughter nearly beaten to the point of being murdered, herself.“Whatcha doing, Alice?”She holds her breath and turns around to discover yet another reason to bury her face in her pillow and scream until her vocal cords snap.





	heaven's off the table

**Author's Note:**

> Sooo I've added another part to this never-ending collection of self-indulgence. And here, friends, is the moment where I would like to remind everyone of that key concept up there: self-indulgence. I am not writing this to please other ppl. If other ppl enjoy it, that's great! Of course I appreciate kudos and support, and I'm totally happy if I can write something that makes other ppl happy! But that said, at the end of the day, this messy, morbid canon divergence is my treat to moi. 
> 
> So why am I going on about myself so much? Did my head spontaneously get bigger than it already was? 
> 
> Nope! Well, maybe. But nah, I'm bringing this point up because frankly, I have some unpopular opinions and interests in this fandom. I mean, at this point it's no lie that I like Gladys, which is unpopular enough, but I'm about to dip even further into unpopular territory in this part of the collection. There is, duh, duh, duh...Gladys/Alice subtext! Or at least one-sided flirting, kinda. Blink-and-miss-it. I'm keeping this collection mostly gen-centric so it's kinda vague, but still. 
> 
> Although it's a mostly gen collection, there's inevitable discussions and allusions to both FP/Alice and FP/Gladys in this part. And like...evidently ships are a thing some ppl fight about, so. Just warning y'all now that my self-indulgent ass is not catering to ship stans of any sort and none of the above ships are poised as superior to the other. This is not a romance fic. Romantic history with the same person just happens to be relevant to these characters' interactions. If you have strong feelings about that kinda thing, you probably want to skip out on this part of the collection.
> 
> It's a collection of one-shots, so like, if you're not feeling this part but still like the collection, that's cool, cause it still makes sense even if you skip it. 
> 
> Okay! Off to experiment with Alice POV now.

The complimentary coffee in the upstairs waiting area of Riverdale General doesn’t taste quite right to Alice. Always tastes too dark for her liking, too bitter no matter how many spoonfuls of non-fat creamer or packets of sweetener she adds. She drinks some anyway, piping hot and soothing to a throat that’s gone sore after days of smothering her frustrated screams into her pillow.

Back when she was Betty’s age, Alice never smothered her screams. She roared her screams out like a dragon belching flames, let them rip forth from her lungs as she turned up the stereo until the angry music her parents despised ravaged her eardrums. But now— well, now she’s the parent, and if she’s going to scream at all, it must be kept secret.

It would be an understatement to say Alice has many things to scream about these days. Murderers in her home, in her bed, her daughter gang raped and nearly beaten to the point of being murdered, herself.

Alice purses her lips, taps her fingers against the steaming paper cup. She should be with Betty, right now. She wants to be. She wants to hold Betty’s hand, stroke her hair, promise her that everything will be fine…but Betty doesn’t seem to want her there.

She shuts down whenever Alice tries to get her to open up. Rebuffs Alice when she reaches out to her, checks out of the conversation before they can even have one, really. Turns to stone at Alice’s touch, practically.

It’s like a knife in the heart. She doesn’t know what to do. Maybe it’s better to give Betty some space right now, give her some privacy to process her pain. Or maybe that’s the opposite of what she should be doing, maybe she should be pushing harder for her to open up and share her feelings so she doesn’t have to swallow them alone.

Though, perhaps she’s opening up to her friends. She’s letting her friends visit, or, Archie and Veronica, anyway. Maybe Alice is the only one getting shut out. As sharp as the sting of that possibility is, Alice isn’t sure she could blame her.

She doesn’t exactly feel like Mother of the Year at the moment. She hasn’t given Betty many reasons to feel safe around her as of late. She never should’ve invited Chic inside. If she hadn’t been so busy falling over herself to gobble up the tender lies of her imposter son, maybe she would’ve figured out what Hal was hiding before things got as dangerous as they did.

Alice doesn’t know what to do. But what she does know is that Betty isn’t receptive to her right now. Thankfully it’s early in the morning and when she did peek in on Betty, she was still asleep. This means she has time to ruminate on the best approach, time to prepare herself for the brick wall Betty might be if her best efforts aren’t enough.

She spends the new few minutes cleaning up the complimentary coffee table. She can’t put her life in order so she puts the table in order instead, tidying the canisters of powdered creamer so that their labels face forward. She stacks the cups nice and neat. She squirts a napkin with hand sanitizer and swabs away the stains dried onto the checkered vinyl tablecloth.

She steps back to survey her work and savors the nominal satisfaction it gives her, sipping from her own paper cup. For a moment, Alice thinks this could be a positive start to the day. A good sign that things might begin looking up. Then she notices she missed something, crooked stirring straws that could use straightening. She steps forward to fix them.

“Whatcha doing, Alice?”

Alice goes rigid. _No,_ she thinks to herself. _Please, no._

She holds her breath and turns around to discover yet another reason to bury her face in her pillow and scream until her vocal cords snap.

Gladys Jones stands in the doorway, hip resting against the doorframe and arms folded.

“How long have you been there?” Alice squawks, startled.

Gladys just smirks that infuriating smirk she’s had since sixteen, straightening up and sauntering on in. Her dark eyes flash and she winks at Alice as she moves past. Alice is blasted with the scent of damp leather and motor oil.

“God, Gladys, you smell like a garage,” she grouses, self-consciously smoothing the nonexistent wrinkles in her blazer.

“Now is that any way to greet an old friend?” Gladys deadpans as she pours herself a cup.

For the sake of being civil, Alice does not point out that she and Gladys have very different ideas about what the word ‘friend' means. She swallows lightly, lifts her chin. Traces the rim of her own coffee cup with her thumbnail.

“How is Jughead doing?”

All the wry humor drains from Gladys’s expression. Her lips pull into a tight grimace.

“So-so,” she sighs, wiggling her hand. “Jug’s a tough nut, but they messed him up something awful.”

“I know, I was here when he got admitted,” Alice says, pointedly holding Gladys’s gaze. _You weren’t._

Gladys looks into her coffee. “How’s Betty?”

Alice hesitates, unsure how to answer. It’s difficult to judge how Betty is doing when she barely even speaks to her. When Alice asks how she is, she gets vague, mostly one word responses and ghosts of phony smiles only meant to placate her. In all reality, Alice doesn’t even know the entirety of what happened to her, because her daughter won’t breathe a word of it and she hasn’t worked up the gumption to broach the specific topic of the 'r' word for fear of making things worse.

“As well as she can be, I suppose,” Alice answers eventually.

“How bad is it?” Gladys asks softly, forehead creasing.

“Bad,” Alice admits, knees suddenly weak. She drops into a chair, setting her coffee down on the small side table with brightly colored informational brochures and rubbing at her temples.

“I’m sorry,” Gladys says, voice raw like she means it.

Alice would like to think she does. But after putting her trust in so many wrong places as of late, she’s more inclined to reserve it. So she only reaches for her coffee again, swallows a mouthful of the too bitter flavor.

“They keep cutting back Jug’s pain meds,” Gladys reveals without prompting, evidently set on conversing like the friends she seems to think they are.

“That’s probably best,” Alice says with frost she hopes reminds her that they are in fact, not friends at all. “The opioid epidemic is at an all time high. Do you really need another addict in the family?”

Gladys jolts, narrows her eyes as she draws a sharp breath. She thrusts into Alice’s space and leans down so they’re face to face, plants her palms against the armrests of the chair.

“It’s real rich hearing you take a crack at my husband when I’m halfway sure you’ve been fucking him,” Gladys taunts with a cutting softness. “Fucking him while your own husband was off on his merry little murder spree, at that.”

Alice raises her head without response and holds her chin high. Aims for her lack of reply to come across as a refusal to engage rather than the reality that she does’t quite have one. She hasn’t fucked FP but she’d be lying if she claimed she hadn’t thought of it, hadn’t flirted with the fantasy of his mouth on her neck or her hands tearing at his flannel. And Hal…well, they’d been having problems for a long time but Alice never imagined that he was capable of such cold, calculated crimes.

“You’re not as put together as you’re trying to be,” Gladys murmurs, seeming to see through her phlegmatic facade.

Gladys even has the gall to tuck some loose strands of hair behind her ear.

“Touch me again,” Alice dares.

“Oh, is that an invitation?” Gladys purrs teasingly.

“Don’t push me right now,” she warns, steeling her gaze.

And Gladys rolls her eyes. She huffs and backs off, letting go of the chair. She stands up and meanders a few steps back, finishing off the last of her coffee, paper cup crunching as she crushes it in her fist.

“Get the stick out of your ass, Alice,” she mutters. “I know I’m not your favorite person, but we’re in the same boat here.”

“Is that so?”

“Our kids are three rooms apart.”

Anger flushes hot beneath Alice’s skin and she snaps to a stand. Before she can stop herself, she snarls out something that’s probably unfair.

“That’s on your son! He asked to be here! My daughter only got dragged into this because she tried to stop him from offering himself up on a platter to those thugs!”

“Hey!” Gladys gasps, incensed. “How dare—“

“THEY TORE HER APART!” Alice screams for the first time in weeks, months, years, without any pillow to muffle her volume, boiling hot blood pounding in her ears.

It leaves her just as quickly. She feels like a firework that’s just gone off, left burnt in the wake of her own explosion, energy dying as her sparks fizzle out. She realizes that she’s just thrown her coffee, though she can’t remember having any intent to do so. The paper cup lies at Gladys’s boots, a pool of brown liquid spilled on the tile between them.

“They tore her apart,” she repeats in a croak, shaken by the very thought of it as well as her own outburst, suddenly quivering like a kitten in the cold.

She is feeling the fallout of everything at once and it is so much. So heavy on her already burdened shoulders. Her eyes sting. The puddle of that unpleasantly bitter coffee blurs before her eyes.

Alice is beyond mortified when the tears begin to fall. She doesn’t want to be this, this raving madwoman who shouts and cries in public. She especially does not want to be this in front of Gladys fucking Jones, the very last person she needed to see on this already horrible, hectic day.

She should excuse herself but that means going into the hall to potentially confront strangers that heard her outburst. At this point, one undesirable but familiar witness is preferable to the multiple unfamiliar witnesses. She wants to snap herself out of it. Instead the tears just keep falling, acid against her cheeks as she suffocates on the intrusive mental snapshots of her Betty broken, brutalized, and blue-lipped in the arms of that Andrews kid she’s never cared for.

The next thing Alice knows, it’s herself she finds in the arms of someone she cares for even less, wet face pushed against leather and rank garage smell suffusing her nostrils. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she wishes it was FP. Wishes it was his smell enveloping her, thicker arms, broader chest to bury herself in.

“Get your shit together before they kick you out,” Gladys advises, giving her a squeeze that is almost reproachful.

“Up yours,” Alice chokes out.

Gladys huffs a sound between annoyance and amusement against the shell of her ear. God, it’s embarrassing. Alice is in public for Pete’s sake. And the last person she wants to crumble into is FP’s scaly sidewinder of a wife. Well— perhaps not exactly the last person. Alice supposes she’s better than Hal. She remembers hands around her throat and decides that, yes, these days she’ll certainly take Gladys over Hal.

Gladys isn’t the person Alice wants, but she is the person who is here, and so Alice accepts this. She stuffs her sobs into Gladys’s shoulder and releases days, weeks, months worth of pent up pain that reached a peak on Riot Night. She sobs until her head goes light and she can feel the ruin of carefully applied mascara drying tacky on her cheeks.

“Feel better?” Gladys asks, releasing her.

Alice swallows the bubble in her throat and nods.

“‘Atta girl,” Gladys thumps her on the back and Alice is simultaneously comforted and cursing herself for coming here early after all.

She pulls napkins from the dispenser on the coffee station and blots off the messy mascara before she gets down to clean up the spilled coffee.

“Now that that’s that, don’t take any more shots at my kid, Cooper.” Gladys crosses her arms as she peers down at Alice on her knees, wiping the coffee from the floor. “I’m not exactly thrilled with what he did, either, but his heart was in the right place. He was trying to take care of his people.”

And just like that, Alice is fuming all over again. She vigorously mops up the mess, huffs as she stands and forcefully chucks the sodden, browned bundles of napkin into the garbage can.

“Betty is one of his people now,” she says sharply. “FP mention that?”

“No,” Gladys says, blinking. “Only that they were together.”

“Yes, well, it turns out Betty did the Serpent Dance the very same day I told_ your_ husband—“ Alice emphasizes, because even if part of her will always want FP for herself, she doesn’t mind assigning ownership to Gladys when he’s pissed her off “—that I’d have his head if Betty became a Serpent.”

Gladys snorts, gives an eye roll as she throws her hands up in the air. “I shouldn’t have even needed to tell him I’d have his head if Juggie joined the Serpents, and yet here we are!”

And despite herself, Alice huffs a bitter laugh. Alright, so in some ways they are in the same boat.

“Guess we’ve got ourselves a man to decapitate,” Gladys jokes, lightly bumping her shoulder against Alice’s.

Alice grins but shakes her head.

“He’s made something of an effort to make it up to me,” she admits, thinking of the body on the floor and his grim compliance in assisting its disposal.

“Oh?” Gladys raises a brow and Alice is unsure if that tone in her voice is envy or merely interest.

“He helped me move something heavy,” she says dismissively, flapping her hand.

“Huh.” Gladys bobs her head and the way she looks at Alice makes it feel like she’s looking through her. “The way I hear it, he’s been moving a lot of heavy things lately.”

Alice’s pulse quickens but she takes a breath and schools her face into an unperturbed mask.

“It was just a rug, Gladys,” she says smoothly. “I had a heavy rug I wanted to throw out because it got stained. Don’t get any strange ideas.”

“Strange ideas,” Gladys repeats, corner of her mouth quirking up.

Alice thinks she sees a hint of danger in the lift of those lips, so she busies herself with choosing a chair. She sits down, folds one leg over the other, and fishes out a new topic for Gladys to latch onto.

“So they’re cutting back Jughead’s medication?”

Gladys’s eyes flash with something fierce and she huffs out this heated noise, plopping heavily into the seat across from Alice.

“Look, it’s not like I want my kid doped up like a zombie, but he’s really hurting. He could use more than some damn ibuprofen, I don’t care if they’re calling it ‘extra strength.’”

“Is he complaining?”

“God, no, sometimes I wish he would.” Gladys gives a gruff shake of the head. “Me and FP didn’t set out to raise crybabies, but still. Jug could get shot and he wouldn’t let out a peep, and that scares the shit outta me.”

“Betty is stoic too…at least around me.” Alice chews her lip. “I can’t get anything out of her about that night…”

“Do you have to? It’s pretty clear what happened, isn’t it?”

Alice’s stomach turns and something cold settles in her chest.

“I want names, I want descriptions. I want justice for every mark on her body, and I don’t want any one of them to get off scoff free.”

“There is someone with that information who isn’t Betty,” Gladys says, leaning forward and peering at Alice intently. “The traitor who led the riots.”

“I already told the cops everything I know about Peabody.”

“The cops,” Gladys repeats, scrunching her nose like it’s a bad pun.

“Of course,” Alice says, although she shifts in her seat, rubs antsy fingertips over her purse strap.

Gladys stands and crosses the tile, clucking her tongue as she moves to the seat next to Alice.

“Do you really want to leave this to the cops?” she asks, soft as sand when it slips through your fingers.

“I’m not a Serpent anymore, Gladys,” Alice affirms pointedly. “I want proper justice through the legal revenues.”

Even as she says it, she is aware that this is not entirely true. Even as she says it, she is thinking of the body that went from the rug to the car, and the car to the river.

“They ripped your daughter apart,” Gladys blurts with all the delicacy of a car crash. “You said so yourself. Broke her bones, left her bloody. Do you think anything the cops do will amount to justice for that, if they bother to convict anyone at all?”

Alice inhales a sharp breath, faces Gladys fully, tries to cough up some protest she can’t actually find in herself.

“I don’t feel like waiting around for the system to kick itself into gear, just to end up letting the fucks who almost killed my son get off easy anyway. Been thinking about doing a little investigating of my own…”

Alice doesn’t need this.

“…you in?” Gladys asks, that dangerous look back.

In this moment, Alice is viscerally aware that it’s going to be months before Betty can walk again. In this moment, Alice is viscerally aware that every scumbag who had everything to do with it is still walking painlessly, unburdened, indifferent, _fuckingfreefreefree._

“We could always get FP to do more of that heavy lifting he’s so good at,” Gladys continues, and the way the proposition leaves her lips feels more like a bullet fired from its gun.

“I suppose I could help you investigate a bit,” Alice answers eventually, that cold feeling that’s been in her chest rooting deeper, spreading wider, spilling into her bloodstream.

“That’s the Alice Smith I remember.” Gladys reaches over and pinches the pressed fabric of Alice’s ivory blazer. “We should get you out of this and back into something black, you know. It suits you much better.”

Alice bats her hand away but when their eyes meet, she winks and tries not to think too hard about potentially regretting the things to come.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, there's gonna be at least one more part to this collection. But who knows how many more, actually. I sure don't. I barely know what it is anymore, lmao. 
> 
> <s>I think it's fair to say I perceive Alice as mildly unhinged and Gladys as decently manipulative. Which, in my messed up head, would make for a delicious dynamic and very interesting possibilities. But I mean, that's probably besides the point.</s>  
Edit: Noticed a butt load of typos, hopefully I got them all. Hey kids, this is why we don't post when we're drunk.


End file.
